The Broken Crown

Chapter 42

Adrianne

Adrianne watched Gabrielle as she walked along the beach. Her face was turned to the waves and it was obvious that she was thinking herself away from here, far away. Adrianne, more than anyone, understood.

“How is she?” she asked, looking down at the girl who her lady-in-waiting was clutching to her chest almost desperately. She was wrapped in white cloth, which flared in the wind.

“Good,” Gabrielle answered, tearing her eyes from the horizon to look at her child. “She caught a fever, but I think it passed.”

Adrianne looked towards her own child. He was sitting, not too far away, playing with the sand. He was a year old now, beginning to tumble around on his legs. There was nothing more enjoyable for her to do than to watch him attempt to pull himself up and watch him as he tried to make sense of the strange sounds that she made. She wished he could stay at this age forever, too young to understand that life was nothing but sand slipping through her fingers.

Suddenly anxious for his well-being, she excused herself and hurried to her son, kneeling before him in the sand. He looked up at her, smiling his innocent smile and laughing. She smiled and watched him pick up some sand, only to throw it up into the wind.

“Yes,” she whispered. “The sand is very funny, isn’t it?” Her own hand went into the sand and curled her hand around it. Christian laughed as it slipped out from the hollow of her hand, trying to grasp the corns. “Can you say sand?” she asked once the last bit of sand had been carried away by the wind. “Sand.”

He made a noise that sounded slightly like the word and she smiled. Then she heard someone approaching and looked up to find the wet-nurse approaching.

“It’s getting cold,” she said. “Do you want me to take him inside?”

Adrianne smiled gratefully, taking her son’s tiny hands into her own. One day, these hands will wield a sword like his father’s. She did not know how that made her feel. “Yes,” she answered finally. Then she turned to her sun. “We wouldn’t want you to catch a cold, would we?”

It was with regret and longing that she watched him be carried away from her. Far away, she saw another woman take Gabrielle’s slightly older daughter from her. Adrianne stayed in the sand, thinking of her son. Her hand grazed her growing stomach, the way it had when she was pregnant with Christian.

With Christian, she had suspected that Raphael might not be the father, but with this child, she was certain. She and Raphael had only spent one night together since the child was conceived, on the last night before he left her here. He had not returned to her since, nor could he.

She had not expected exile to be necessary, not even in her darkest of dreams. War had been the furthest from her mind, and it was only now that it had broken out that she realized how many signs of warning she had managed to ignore. Her husband fought that war now, risking his life and family’s position to end it, only because they had all been so ignorant to assume that the rebellion would blow over.

Gabrielle shared that loss, and so did Celeste who had just arrived two months earlier. After her marriage, she had spent three months in Lionhall, but when the war spread eastwards, she was forced to leave the mainland and her husband.

Still, she was by far the happiest of the three women. Her ignorance and naivety had saved her from a lot of pain, and continued to do so.

“We haven’t consummated our marriage,” Adrianne’s cousin had revealed on a stormy nights, when the waves had risen high and given the ladies in exile some idea of the fear that their men faced every day. “He fears for me.”